The holiday season is a time of great celebration, but if you have recently lost someone who was very close to you, the holidays can be painful and hard to endure. You are grieving, yet everyone expects you to join in the good times.

Similarly, if you lost a loved one at a holiday time in a previous year, the season can be a difficult challenge for you ever thereafter.

If this describes you, remember first that it is perfectly okay for you to have conflicting feelings and ups and downs. Trying to suppress or mask your grief doesn’t help, as it will surface eventually. Fully experiencing your feelings is the best way to work through them.

A safe and effective way to work through your grief and find a way to enjoy the celebrations again is by using your journal.

Journaling, by nature, is a solitary exercise. And since we are often concerned with our deepest secret selves in our journals, we rarely share these writings with others. So it’s a special treat when we’re allowed a peek inside someone else’s journal. The cinema is one place where we can occasionally enjoy the journaling lives of others.

Besides your daily feelings, thoughts, and experiences journal, there are many ideas for journals or diaries that you can keep, some are suggested below.

Buy a blank book or a notebook with a particular journal topic in mind and keep this book for only that topic. You may decide to keep several kinds of journals at the same time, so remember that you do not have to journal every day.

Committed journalers know that maintaining a daily journaling practice is an excellent way to open new channels of self-discovery and self-expression.

When you keep a journal in which you write regularly, if not daily, you have the opportunity to process all the experiences in your life and gain a greater understanding of yourself and others.

Sometimes, though, problems arise.

You may open your journal one day and find that the blank lines stare back at you, daring you to sully them with your unedited thoughts.

You begin to feel overwhelmed and come to the decision that you just don’t have the time to “properly” journal. You run into a journaling brick wall and eventually your journal just dies from lack of attention.

If you’ve ever had this experience, or are having it right now, here are three simple tips to get back into journaling:

Are you off to a vacation adventure this season? Have you ever kept a travel journal?

A travel journal is where you write about your personal, family and/or business travels. It can be a separate journal where you record your experiences, details, and even your feelings about your travels, creating a written record of each trip.

You can also record your travels, if you already journal, in your existing journal. Just indicate that this is a record of your travels — That can be accomplished by using a separate color of pen.

On January 1st, some people start off the year with a bright new notebook.

“This is the year I’m going to write my journal every day,” they think. Then, around January 6th – and, co-incidentally, Epiphany – they find their journaling has ground to a halt.

There’s too much to do. They have too little to say. Or so they think.

Here are some tips for this New Year – starting this very day. These techniques are drawn from life-long journaling (by me and other people including everyone from Virginia Woolf to Bridget Jones). Although not an exhaustive list, they will get you started and keep you going:

Beautiful Leather Journals!

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